May 2014 Update

posted May 21, 2014, 7:05 AM by North Jersey TU

The 2013/14 TIC season has come to an end, onion sacks have been delivered to the participating schools, and the classroom-raised Brookies are about to be released into designated streams. One more thank-you is in order to all of you who helped make it possible.

The following is a message that I received from Jessica Griglak at the Pequest Hatchery. The recent bacteria outbreak at the Pequest trout hatchery will have consequences as well for next season's TIC program. There will be a TIC season in 2014/15, but this time we will be raising Rainbow Trout instead of New Jersey's state fish, the Brook Trout. Jessica's message explains it all.

I wish you all a very pleasant summer, l am looking forward to work with you again in the fall.

Just to let you know that we have a few new things happening with TIC for this upcoming year. This past year, Pequest was hit hard with the Furunculosis bacteria. Due to this issue, we had to put down our brook trout broodstock, which means no brook trout eggs for the fall. We are planning on resupplying the hatchery with a bacteria-resistant strain of brook trout from NY, but we will not be getting these eggs for a year or two – once we make sure that the hatchery has been flushed thoroughly.

With no broodstock to take the eggs from, TIC schools will be receiving rainbow trout eggs for at least the 2014-15 school year, if not the year after that as well. This doesn’t change anything with the program, and I will be sending out a rainbow trout fact sheet to the teachers when we get started to explain everything to them.

Rainbow trout eggs are taken first at Pequest, so our Egg Day will be early this year (and possibly the next – just depends on how long we have rainbow trout eggs for TIC). We will be looking at an Egg Day that will occur in early October – around the second week or so.

This means that schools will need to have their tanks set up and running a few weeks earlier than usual.

Our permits currently read that we are releasing brook trout. I will be working with the biologists to see if we can make the permit change as painless as possible for the teachers. My hopes is that they will agree to send all the teachers with current permits an official letter that states that we are aware that they are releasing rainbow trout, not brook trout, but that is something I will be working out with them in the upcoming months.

Hatching rainbow trout will not change the stocking locations at all, so we are ok on that end.